


Arcane Rituals

by lalejandra



Category: Harry Potter - Fandom
Genre: Gen, Transformative Works Welcome, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-02-02
Updated: 2005-02-02
Packaged: 2019-07-14 10:09:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16038296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalejandra/pseuds/lalejandra
Summary: Draco will either be revered or despised, but either would be better than this non-existence in exile.Co-authored with Kassie.





	Arcane Rituals

The war begins quietly, with several Muggle deaths all at once. Blaise doesn't notice, because who takes notice of what happens to the tedious Muggles? Queenie notices. She tells him, "The world is shaking," but Blaise writes it off as more of her strange prophecies that don't exist and don't come true.

She's right, though; Dumbledore announces at tea the next day that there are great changes in the Muggle world. The day after that, Professor Binns is replaced with Professor Elantris, and the History of Magic is replaced with that of Current Events In The Muggle World.

If Lucius Malfoy was not in Azkaban, Blaise imagines that he would be leading the procession of horrified parents. But without a rallying point, the Wizarding parents can't come together, can't coalesce into a unified force with a common goal. The Muggle parents don't care -- they're all too busy trying to pretend that their children aren't strange and different.

Blaise doesn't learn anything in Current Events In The Muggle World that he thinks would ever be useful. Countries in upheaval, Muggles fighting with each other -- ridiculous. It would never affect Hogwarts; it would never affect the Wizarding world, except to thwart Dumbledore's plans to integrate Wizards and Muggles. A ridiculous plan anyway, since whenever Muggles are confronted with what they cannot immediately understand, they resort to violence.

Rather like Gryffindors in that.

**

Draco thought, after waiting for years that tower behind him like a row of fluttering Dementors, that victory would taste of an unnamed, exotic spice. Something worth all the effort, time, planning, fixation. Instead, all he tastes is the bile from his own stomach, the after effect of vomiting on the corpses.

Some people see pettiness, peevishness, rigid decorum, snobbery, and vindictiveness as evil. Others know that true evil, the sort that parents scare their children with, that forms the seed of truth to folktales, is pretty, shiny, something you long for, embrace, love with even that tiny recess of your heart you try to hold back -- just in case. Evil steals your just in case.

The blur and wash of childish revenge schemes, of name calling and competitiveness stems not from evil but from human nature, and here is not the place to debate tabula rasa and a priori. People who fight their own natures tend to point at those who don't and say evil, when what they really mean is "me, if I don't try hard enough". Draco never suffered from that particular internal conflict.

Draco had enough external conflict to cope with. The day Draco stood over the bodies of his father and Dumbledore, their charred, vaguely green flesh summoning his breakfast from his belly, he didn't feel vindicated or triumphant like he had planned. He felt terror. And he wished Potter really hadn't been everything he'd always accused him of.

* *

In the undiscovered country that is Blaise's subconscious, they always lose, and lose badly. His dreams are fully birthed nightmare landscapes his waking self wears a lifted eyebrow to avoid imagining.

*

I.

The dead, brown grass, hopeless beyond even the House Elves, crunches under Blaise's feet as he walks to Draco. Draco is a living metaphor for why deadly and poisonous creatures are beautiful: his thick, pale hair represents youth and innocence; his pearly grey eyes posit wisdom and secrets; the athletic-looking body promises virility.

Blaise knows better. Draco hasn't been an athlete since the war ended, hasn't been innocent since birth, has never been wise. Since the end of the war -- the war his father both started and finished -- Draco has chased wisdom and youth. He goes through three, sometimes five slaves every week, torturing and dismembering them, trying to discover -- discover something. Blaise finds their entrails strewn across Draco's room, their bodies open and cold on the floor, resting in their own congealed blood.

Thank Mordred for House Elves, because there is no way in the Eight Hells of Circe that Blaise would clean that crap up himself.

Draco is staring at nothing, his fingers twisting around themselves. If Draco was Theodore, Blaise would be worried, but Draco is Draco, and the idea of wandless magic as foreign to him as sanity. Not that Draco was ever entirely sane, but now he's completely round the bend. Round the bend, down the lane, over the hill, and past the borders of every country known to Wizardingkind.

When Blaise places his hand on Draco's arm, Draco looks up at him, and it's almost like old times. Draco's grey eyes are smoky with lust, and he leans into Blaise, breathing unsteadily.

Blaise puts an arm around Draco and stands him up.

"Not today," he says in low tones. Draco looks disappointed, but Blaise knows that he will be distracted by something else in the seconds it takes them to walk back into the house. The sky is green and grey and purple, and Blaise doesn't want Draco to be outside in the rain.

II.

Narcissa is mad. Not mad in the usual, unhinged but amusing witchy way. She doesn't dress in monochrome and sing in a made-up gibberish language like Blaise's cousin Eustace. She doesn't think she's a turtle, an elm tree, a gypsy, or a wombat like other people he's known. She's everything her sister hinted at but never got right: Narcissa is death made flesh, a terror far greater than a warped wizard with plans for a ridiculously out-dated new wizarding order.

Draco dies alone and afraid somewhere in the dark. Blaise doesn't know how he died or who killed him, or even if it wasn't his own fault or an accident. Narcissa isn't given to affording details. Mainly she kills indiscriminately.

In the way of great irony, Blaise spent his youth thinking that life, no matter how it was lived, would be preferable to death. Now, on days when Narcissa hates him for reminding him too much of her son, Blaise wishes she'd make good on her promises to send him after Draco into the abyss.

III.

Blaise does not fight in the war. He retreats to the Zabini family home in Dorchester and remains there, Unplottable. He does not send Owls, does not receive Owls, and spends his time experimenting with new Arithmancy spells that are actually quite old. Before he Portkeyed home, he stole several of Professor Vector's oldest scrolls, the ones she kept under magical lock and key. Her password was easy to guess: FORMULAIC. A pun, but not a clever one.

Poor Professor Vector was one of the first killed when the war came to Hogwarts, but Blaise can't summon up any pity. She should have known better. They all should have known better, even Blaise.

He isn't sure what it was that made him leave a trail for Draco -- a trail he thought obvious to a fault, but one never knew what Draco would notice and what he would think beneath his notice. Draco's delusions of status were -- are -- tedious, but Blaise feels a strange, almost misplaced affection for him anyway. Perhaps that's why he left a trail.

The only Wizard to follow the trail is Harry Potter. When he Apparates to the edge of the grounds and walks through the wards, Blaise feels him immediately; his scar is a beacon to all and sundry attuned to those sorts of things. Blaise does not hesitate to kill him -- it is over quickly. He allows Potter's body to be taken away by the House Elves, used for mulch or whatever it is they do with people killed. They have experience with that sort of thing, hundreds of years of it.

"What do you mean you killed him?" Draco's face is the mask, a haughty sneer that covers what would otherwise be tears. Blaise sees Lucius there in the tilt of the chin, but, more frighteningly, he sees Narcissa in the casually unaffected body language. His wand dangles between two fingers, rolling back and forth over thumb and index finger, drawing the eye. That's an old, distraction trick he never thought he'd see Draco use on him.

"I mean he walked into one of my traps, and he was blown up." Blaise stares at this person he thought, once, he knew so well. Better than himself. "Kaboom," he adds, aiming at sarcastic.

Draco kills him, but Blaise got in the last word.

IV.

Blaise kills seventeen people to get to Draco before he falls, but he is too late, and the last thing he sees before Potter's red face and mad eyes and a flash of green light is Draco's head rolling on the ground, Draco's mouth open in a small O of surprise.

* *

The tactic to kill the figureheads for both contingents in the Second Voldemort War was good on scroll. Draco can see that, understand it. He knows a little bit about tactics after spending his entire childhood and youth in an internecine conflict that was mainly played out in his head. Comprehending the method in Potter's utter insanity doesn't thrill him like he once thought it might. Seeing one play ahead on the board is hard enough when both players are sane, but Draco recognizes that he himself has never been a role model for mental hygiene.

Blaise sits with his back to him, something very few people would ever imagine doing, talking with Granger about some horrible boring arithmantical contrivance that will _surely_ kill Potter this time. Blaise has become oddly superstitious. He won't share his dreams anymore. Not his aspirations, everyone has the same one of those: to live. No, Blaise refuses to acknowledge that he sleepwalks, that he draws equations and diagrams on the walls of the house with his wand while sleeping, only to never understand the etching when awake. Granger says its stress. She thinks everything is stress. Draco hopes that explains her horrendous fashion sense and hair issues.

Perhaps Draco's vitriol exists because no one will take his plans seriously. Granger believes she understands Potter, but Potter is not her equal. Potter is mad in the sort of way that Draco is mad -- hacked off with the world, hacked off with his enemies and allies both, made insane by years of torture at the hands of Muggle-loving idiots with no sense in their heads to try to make the world a better place for their own people, focusing instead on outsiders who matter naught to anyone but themselves.

Granger will never understand that -- she's one of them. She's Potter's ally because she wants to save him before he can hurt himself. She's Draco and Blaise's ally because she wants to stop Potter. Draco never confuses the word "ally" with the word "friend" -- Granger is no one's friend. She's a Gryffindor, through and through, and for all her help, she will be a hindrance when the time comes to kill Potter.

Draco will kill Potter. This is his plan. He will seduce his way into Potter's camp with tales of glory and raising Potter upon high to rule with him, and once he is in Potter's graces, he will kill him, put his head on a pike, and burn his body so that he can never be resurrected.

Then Draco will either be revered or despised, but either would be better than this non-existence in exile.

  



End file.
